The handshake started out as a solution to a problem. It’s been steadily creating new ones ever since.

As recently as the 17th century, a European man who came upon one of his social superiors was expected to remove his hat with his left hand and bend to a 90-degree angle in a scraping bow. Clearly, men were more supple back then. That move would leave most of us in either a dentist’s chair or on a chiropractor’s bench.

Picture yourself as this sad bastard — one hand ruinously clutching your new velvet chapeau, the other turning small circles in the air, legs wobbling, sweat popping, bile rising, waiting for an acknowledgment from your idiot brother-in-law or your cousin’s accountant.

If this sort of thing was still done, the modern workplace would be a little more hygienic and a lot more murderous.

The handshake’s been around forever, but didn’t gain traction in the western world until the radical rethinking of class sent the toadying, hat-grasping mob looking for a more egalitarian gesture of greeting.

Less supplicating; more shoulder dislocating.

Even though we’ve been at it for a couple hundred years, we still haven’t got the handshake figured. As a rule, they’re either too limp, too strong, too vigorous or too clammy. It’s become de facto encouragement for a hug, which is a worrying progression. What comes after the hug? Spend an awful moment considering the possibilities.

You’re not sure whose hand you’re supposed to shake any more. There is no more confusing, middle-class social conundrum than being introduced to a woman these days. That horrible moment when the pair of you are staring at each other and you’re thinking, “Does she want to shake hands, or would that be weird?” You realize you’ve waited too long. Now you have to do something. If you wait any longer, you’re drifting into hug territory.

So you fling your hand out from behind your back like you’ve got a rabbit in it. As your arm is approaching horizontal, it becomes appallingly clear that she wasn’t expecting this. You’ve stumbled into the worst thing of all — the surprise shake. Now she’s lurching forward to get her hand out there in time and . . . well, it doesn’t matter how this ends. It’s gotten weird.

In regular life, the handshake is problematic. Upon introduction into the world of sports, it becomes the atomic bomb of physical gestures.

Athletes who like each other hug each other. They only shake hands if they’re forced to.

When people are forced to do nice things for each other, the result is violent chaos. You end up with the Kelly family Christmas, circa 1984, when a proposed toy-sharing arrangement involving a G.I. Joe battle fortress ended in a tree-destroying brawl.

The English Premier League began enforcing a pre-game shake four years ago. It hasn’t gone well. This week, they considered scrapping it, in large part because there are several combustible encounters looming. John Terry and Anton Ferdinand will be forced to shake hands in two weeks’ time ahead of the Chelsea-QPR game. The last time they spent some time together was in court over the summer after an on-field meltdown got racial. This is how all friendly encounters should start — with a patdown for thumbtacks.

After consideration, they’ve decided to stick with the handshake. How British. Why let the potential for violence get in the way of good manners? After all, that’s only how World War I started.

They don’t shake hands in baseball on the reasonable grounds that you’ve added a three-foot-long club into the mix. Football players get to choose who they’re going to shake hands with.

Hockey players shake hands four times a year, max. If the season is cancelled, Martin Brodeur’s internal calculation is going to be, “On the one hand, I lost $4 million. On the other, I ran zero risk of touching Sean Avery’s flesh. So . . . pretty much even.”

In the most foolish example of making something nasty seem nice, boxers are forced to shake mid-fight. Last year, Victor Ortiz got knocked out as he was clumsily trying to shake Floyd Mayweather’s hand. A few people were upset. The rest of us thought, “Wait. That’s a thing now? I can do that? How long until Christmas?”

It had its moment, but the handshake is dwindling toward nothingness. All we need is one really good run of bird flu and we’ll be back to bowing, preferably from either side of plate glass.

However long it continues, it’s best done spontaneously by consenting adults. When debating what role they ought to play in the process, the people who run sports leagues might first imagine it beginning with the words, “Now you boys shake hands . . .” and add up how many fights (re)started that way.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.